9 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Campaign Will Fail

By Jasmine Henry @B2Community 1/12/13

Worst Email Mistakes

No way is email marketing dead. Sure, “only” 4.24% of people who click through to your website from email marketing will buy something, but that’s staggering compared to the fact that the figures for search engines and social media are 2.49% and 0.59%. That’s no typo—email is approximately 7.18 times more effective than social media. Too bad all the late Nigerian Princes with vast fortunes and wills that mention random Americans ruined it. You can make email work, but remember that your prospects are a little jaded. Here are 9 ways to ensure that your communications aren’t trustworthy:

1. Give the Impression of Spamming

Even if you’ve got a stellar sender score and you’re providing your contacts with invaluable information, if your emails give the impression of being a little creepy you might be perceived as a spammer:

Does Your Subject Line Appear Vague or Overly-Familiar?

Is Your Subject Line Typed in All-Caps?

Your Subject Line Has Way Too Many Exclamation Points!!!!!!!!

2. You’re Not Cleaning Your Email Lists

If your email marketing efforts result in any hard bounces, take the time to clean them off your contacts list immediately. Continuing to mail to full or closed accounts will give a pretty big hit to your sender score and result in you being blacklisted by many major email clients. It’s much easier to maintain a high sender score than try and repair a damaged score.

3. Fail at Personalization

Do all of your emails start with “Hi there”? Better yet, is the first name of your recipients in a conspicuously different font or color than the rest of your email? Personalization fails happen, and they’re pretty darn embarrassing:

4. Don’t Optimize Email for Mobile Phones

If you totally ignore the fact that 36% of emails are opened on a smartphone and don’t mobile-optimize, you could find that your email marketing metrics fall by over a third. Your images, content, and design need to be open-ready on phones.

5. Don’t Segment Your Email List

Ensuring your email marketing efforts are sent to all of your contacts, regardless of whether they’re long-term customers or new leads, decision-makers or money-savers, is one way to drive away customers and prospects. And if you email quarterly messages that are a really boring run-down of company updates, like your CEO’s vacation to Bora Bora, you’ll lose even more business. Nothing will drive your unsuscribe rate through the roof faster than incredibly irrelevant information. (continue @B2Community)